Only God Knows the Heart

“God knows my heart.” I heard that a lot growing up. My mother said it often. Usually when I was hurt or confused by something she had done. When I did not understand her actions. When I thought they might be wrong. When I was hurt by them. But God knew her heart and I didn’t.

There was another thing I was taught about hearts, though. They were deceitful.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
—Jeremiah 17:9

Somehow, I never noticed the friction that those two teachings had created in me. When it came to other people, I was supposed to remember that I couldn’t possibly see their hearts. I needed to consider their intentions, give grace, and assume I might not understand. What looked wrong to me might not be what I thought it was, after all. God knew their hearts.

But when it came to my own? Well, my heart was deceitful. I couldn’t necessarily trust my own intentions. I couldn’t trust what I wanted. I couldn’t even always trust my understanding of why I had done something.

Do you see what happened there? Other people’s hearts deserved the benefit of the doubt. Mine did not. It deserved suspicion.

I had spent much of my life being misunderstood. I don’t mean people simply misunderstood something I said or that they didn’t understand why I made a particular decision. That can happen to anyone. What I mean is that people told me why I did things. They assigned motivations to me that weren’t there. Things I did from fear were called pride. Things I did because I cared were interpreted as something else. Even the way I tried to make myself smaller (to disappear, really) was sometimes called false humility.

For most of my life, I thought other people might know better than I did. After all, the heart is deceitful. Maybe I didn’t know my own. Except Scripture says something very interesting about that deceitful heart. It doesn’t say that because I cannot perfectly understand my heart, someone else can. It says God does.

“For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”
—1 Samuel 16:7

Solomon says the same thing when he prays:

“…for you, you only, know the hearts of all the children of mankind.”
—1 Kings 8:39

You only. And Jeremiah doesn’t stop at verse 9, although I think sometimes we do.

“The heart is deceitful above all things.” Period. Except God keeps speaking there.

“I the LORD search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.”
—Jeremiah 17:10

God knows the heart. I believe that now more than I ever have, but I am beginning to understand that the words mean almost the opposite of what I had learned, over time, to do with them.

If God knows the heart, why are we so willing to claim that we know one another’s? Why do we look at someone’s behavior and then fill in the invisible part ourselves? “She did that because…” “He only said that because…” “She’s just looking for attention.” “That’s pride.” “That’s bitterness.” “You’re trying to…”

We can see actions. We can listen to words and examine fruit. Sometimes we can even have very good reasons to suspect what may be motivating something. But the heart? Scripture reserves something there for God, and I think we can do devastating damage to others when we forget the difference.

There is a difference between discerning fruit and declaring that we know what is hidden inside another human being. There is a difference between saying, “What you did was wrong,” and saying, “I know why you did it.”

I didn’t understand that difference for most of my life. I am now beginning to.

There is a difference between telling someone what they did and telling them why they did it. I didn’t understand that difference for a very long time. You can tell me something I said hurt you, that something I did was wrong, or what you saw in a given situation. You can tell me how my actions affected you and you can tell me when you see a pattern in my behavior that I haven’t noticed yet. Those are things we can talk about.

Unfortunately, there is another step we take sometimes. We begin to say (or think) “You did that because…” Suddenly, we aren’t talking about what happened anymore. We are talking about someone’s heart.

I have had people do this to me for most of my life. They didn’t simply interpret my actions differently than I did. They supplied motivations for them that weren’t there. There is something particularly difficult about being told why you did something when you know that isn’t why you did it. How do you defend yourself against that?

I have sincerely tried to explain my inner motivations to people in the past. Sometimes they understand. Often, they do not. I have been told that my understanding of why I did something was completely wrong. That I was becoming defensive by giving my side. Or I was told that what I thought I was thinking wasn’t really what I had been thinking. That, perhaps, I didn’t have enough awareness to see it. If I insisted I knew what I meant, I was told that I was lying to myself. When I insisted I wasn’t, at times, I was told (mostly by my mother and, if not, then those she had convinced) that I was lying to myself and believed it because I was bipolar. The day it was proven I wasn’t was a day so many chains broke.

For a Christian, there is an especially effective way to end the conversation. “The heart is deceitful.” Except look at what just happened. I can’t know why I did something because my heart is deceitful. But somehow, someone else is perfectly capable of seeing my inner world. It really should make us pause for a moment. I know it bothers me. It creates an accusation that can never be disproven.

Anything someone says to correct another’s interpretation can simply become additional evidence that their interpretation was right. If I explain myself, I’m defensive. If I get upset, I’ve been exposed. If I insist that wasn’t my motive, I lack self-awareness. If I walk away because I realize there is no way to convince you, my walking away can become evidence too. There is no answer.

There is something deeply dangerous about using Scripture to make another person’s own testimony about what is happening inside them irrelevant. Yes, Scripture tells me my heart can deceive me. It tells you that about yours too. It does not follow that because I can misunderstand myself, you therefore understand me. Paul explains something to us…

“Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.”
—1 Corinthians 4:5

The Lord will disclose the purposes of the heart. Not you or me. Of course, that doesn’t for one moment mean we can become foolish. We don’t just ignore harmful behaviors. We definitely don’t stop discerning or ignore obvious patterns that are clearly there. What we do is learn where observation ends and presumption begins. While I can tell you that you did something to me that hurt me or that I am concerned for you about a pattern I see, I cannot say that it is my right to declare what exists inside of you.

Scripture warns us about being too quick even with what we think we understand.

“If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.”
—Proverbs 18:13

We are supposed to hear. That includes listening when another person tells us what they meant. It doesn’t require us to believe everything everyone tells us. People can lie. People can deceive themselves. People can hide motives even from themselves. The possibility that someone could potentially be deceived, however, doesn’t give us the right to decide that they absolutely are deceived or will always be deceived if they are in a current moment. It definitely doesn’t give me a right to replace your explanation for your behavior with one that I invented and then call my own interpretation of what you did discernment when I don’t have the data or facts to validate that conclusion.

Sometimes the most truthful thing we can say is this… I see what you did, and I see the fruit it produced, but I don’t know exactly what was happening in your heart when you did it. But God does.

There are things we are called to discern, and there are things we should have enough humility to admit we just cannot see.

I have been thinking about humility a lot lately. Mostly because I realized I had taken it somewhere God never asked me to go. I didn’t just try not to think too highly of myself. I erased myself. I became afraid of vanity, selfishness, and taking up too much space. Afraid of wanting things for myself. I became afraid, at times, of something as simple as looking in the mirror for too long. I thought that was what dying to self meant. That there had to be less of me until I absolutely disappeared.

Here’s the strange thing… Some people looked at that and saw pride. Some called it false humility. False humility exists, of course. Someone can make themselves appear small because they want people to notice how small they are being. Someone can reject a compliment because they want another one. Someone can absolutely perform humility while secretly hoping everyone recognizes how extraordinarily humble they are. We all know it happens. That wasn’t what was happening inside of me, however.

I wasn’t making myself small so people would think I was humble. I genuinely believed I was supposed to become small. I was even afraid not to. While those two things can look remarkably similar from the outside, internally, they are pretty much exact opposites. One says, “Look how humble I am,” while the other says, “I am afraid I am doing something wrong by existing too loudly.” The behavior an observer sees might sometimes look exactly the same while the heart producing it isn’t.

I want to be careful here. I am not saying I have never been prideful. I have. Everyone has. We are liars if we say we haven’t. I am, after all, human. I am saying something much narrower and, I think, much more important. You can have a correct observation of what someone has done or is doing and still be completely wrong about why they are doing it. This matters more than I know how to express in words (which is odd for me) when we start attaching spiritual labels to people.

Pride. Jealousy. Bitterness. Attention-seeking. Manipulation. False humility. Rebellion. These words don’t merely describe someone’s behavior. They actually work to make claims regarding what is happening inside of someone. Sometimes we’re absolutely right. Sometimes we aren’t. Isn’t that the nature of misunderstandings?

God told Samuel, “For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). I used to hear that verse as mainly being a statement about God’s ability. Now I also hear what it says about mine.

I see the outside, but God sees the heart. That takes humility to understand. But somehow, we have a tendency to turn God’s ability to know the heart into confidence in our own ability to do the same thing. Paul warns us about that too…

“…the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.”
—1 Corinthians 4:5

There are purposes of the heart that are hidden. That doesn’t mean behavior doesn’t matter, but it does mean that behavior and motive aren’t identical. It also means that we should listen, ask questions, and leave room for the possibility that what we think we are seeing isn’t actually what is happening inside of another person. Perhaps, most importantly, it means that we should be very careful before we attach God’s name to our interpretation.

God’s knowledge of the heart is not permission for me to pretend I possess it too. If anything, it should remind me that I don’t.

I remember I was twenty years old. I already had one child, and I was sixteen weeks pregnant with another. I had gotten a job at Motorola in the purchasing department as a cost analyst (and that was all God, I was not qualified for the role). I had always given my paychecks to my mother. Then, after a friend at work had been discussing the benefits of direct deposit, I decided that I wanted my own bank account.

That’s it. I never once thought to check with my mother. There wasn’t some grand rebellion behind my actions. I definitely wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, nor was I rejecting my family. I also wasn’t making some statement about my mother. I pretty much worshipped her at the time. I just wanted somewhere to put the money I earned.

My mother didn’t take it well. I had gotten off of work, gone to the bank, opened the account, got my new temporary checks, drove to her house, and asked her how much of the money from my paycheck she wanted.

She screamed at me. So badly that I had an anxiety attack. It was so emotionally violent that I didn’t even understand what she was saying. All I felt was terror and confusion. I remember that. About a week later, I went to the doctor for an ultrasound. The baby was dead.

I want to be very clear here because I don’t want to make a claim I cannot make. I do not know why my baby died. They did tests and could find no reason. I don’t know exactly when my baby died. I don’t know whether the anxiety attack had anything whatsoever to do with it, and I am not claiming that my mother caused my pregnancy loss. I know only the sequence of events as I remember them.

I wanted my own bank account. My mother did what she did. I had my first severe anxiety attack. Then, about a week later, I went for an ultrasound and learned that the baby I had been carrying for sixteen weeks was dead.

The doctor asked me if there was anyone I could call because I was too upset to drive. My mother lived about fifteen minutes away, so I called her. Remember, this is all at the age of 20. I asked my mother to come get me, and she started screaming at me (again) for calling her crying and asking her for a ride when she had her own things going on.

My husband at the time was working, so I called him instead. I sat in that doctor’s office waiting room for more than an hour, crying, waiting for him to get there. When he did, I didn’t tell him what my mother had done. Why? I was ashamed. Not of what she had done, but of the fact that I had upset her.

Even after being told my baby was dead, even after calling my mother because the doctor didn’t think I should drive myself home, somehow I was the one carrying the shame. I had called her crying. I had asked her to come get me. I had upset her. So, I didn’t tell my husband. He never knew.

I see that differently now too, because when people ask why psychological harm matters, this is part of the answer. Sometimes the harm isn’t only what someone does to you. Sometimes it is what you learn to do with what they did to you. Some of us learn to hide it. To explain it away, blame ourselves, and protect them. Until we start to carry the shame for them.

My husband couldn’t respond to something he didn’t know had happened. He couldn’t tell twenty-year-old me, “You didn’t do anything wrong.” He couldn’t be angry for me. He couldn’t help me make sense of it, because I had already learned to keep the attention on what I might have done wrong.

I have been sitting with that memory differently lately. For a long time, memories like this existed in my head as things that happened. I knew they happened, and I knew they hurt, but I don’t think I understood what they taught me.

Look at the two things I had asked for. First, I wanted something for myself. I wanted my own bank account. I wanted control over the money I earned. That want was met not just with anger, but with actual psychological abuse. Then, about a week later, I needed my mom. I couldn’t drive. My baby had just died. I begged her to come get me. It was also met with abuse.

What exactly was I supposed to learn from that? Was the lesson not to become independent? Well if that was the lesson, it would have at least been straightforward. But that wasn’t the lesson. Nor was it to be able to depend on people. The lesson was pretty much, “Don’t want something for yourself and don’t need anything from anyone else.” It was to refuse to separate from my unhealthy family, but also not be a burden to them. No matter what I did, I couldn’t win.

When experiences like that happen enough, I think we have a tendency to stop recognizing the rules we’re actually living by. They just become our lived reality.

Wanting something for myself felt dangerous. Needing someone felt dangerous. Other people’s anger felt like evidence that I had done something wrong. Now I can see another rule I learned. If someone hurts me and becomes upset with me, protect them and question myself.

As a result, I learned to need less. I learned to want less, ask for less, take up less space, tell less. And when someone was upset with me, I learned to look inward first. What did I do? What is wrong with me? What selfish thing did I want?

It has taken me decades to look back at that twenty-year-old woman and ask a completely different question. What was wrong with wanting my own bank account? Nothing. What was wrong with calling my mother, crying, after being told my baby had died and asking her to drive fifteen minutes to come get me? Nothing. And what did I have to be ashamed of when she screamed at me for asking? Nothing.

I was allowed to want independence. I was allowed to need my mother. I was allowed to cry. I was absolutely allowed to tell someone when I had been hurt. Those things were never wrong, but somewhere along the way, I had learned that all of them could cost me, and cost me dearly.

I don’t remember anyone sitting me down and teaching me these things. No one handed me a list that said wanting something for yourself is selfish or that needing someone makes you a burden. No one flat out told me that if someone is angry with you, you probably did something wrong. I learned those lessons anyway.

I think that’s how some of our deepest beliefs are formed. They aren’t always taught to us in words. Sometimes, they are taught through repetition. You want something and someone gets angry. You need something and someone gets angry. You cry and someone gets angry. You explain what you meant and you’re told that isn’t what you meant. You remember something and someone tells you it didn’t happen. Again, and again, and again. Eventually, you stop consciously thinking about any of it. You just know. Or you think you do, anyway.

I thought I knew that wanting something for myself was selfish. I thought I knew that independence could hurt people. I thought I knew that needing someone made me burdensome. I thought I knew my crying could make me a problem or that someone’s anger meant I needed to figure out what I had done wrong. I even thought I knew that other people might understand my motives better than I did.

Underneath all of it was something I didn’t even realize I believed. I cannot trust my own heart.

These weren’t ideas I examined and decided were true. They became the lens through which I examined everything else. Lately, as I have been going back through Scripture, I have been thinking about something Jeremiah wrote.

“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.”
—Jeremiah 31:33

There is that word again. Heart. The Hebrew word is actually lev. The inner person. The place Scripture associates with thought, understanding, intention, desire, will. God says He will write His Torah there.

I want to be careful with the comparison I’m about to make. Jeremiah is talking about God writing His Torah on the hearts of His people. He isn’t teaching that human beings literally write things onto one another’s hearts in the same way God does. I’m borrowing the image because I don’t know a better way to describe what happens when something is taught to us so deeply, for so long, that we stop knowing it was ever taught at all.

Things can become inscribed in us. Parents can teach us things. Churches can teach us things. Relationships can teach us things. Fear can teach us things. Shame can teach us things. Sometimes those lessons settle so deeply within us that they no longer feel as if they were ever lessons. They simply feel like truth.

That is what happened to me. Some things were written into me so deeply that I mistook them for truth. They were deeply inscribed, but they weren’t His. That’s an important distinction for me now, because for a very long time, I thought some of these things came from God. After all, didn’t Scripture tell me not to be selfish? Didn’t Jesus tell me to deny myself? Didn’t Scripture warn me that my heart was deceitful? Didn’t God want humility?

Yes, all of these things are true, but somewhere between what God actually said and what I learned to believe, other things had been added and some had been outright distorted. Don’t be selfish became don’t want. Deny yourself became erase yourself. Be humble became make yourself smaller. The heart can deceive you became don’t trust yourself. God knows the heart became give everyone else’s motives the benefit of the doubt, even when their fruit is hurting you.

Those aren’t the same teachings, but I couldn’t yet understand that. When something has been inside of you for decades, discovering that it isn’t true can feel disorienting at times. In fact, at times I had begun to question my own sanity. I am so grateful He carried me through it. Because you’re not simply changing your mind about an idea. You’re discovering that something that you had used to determine what was right and wrong (something you used to understand yourself, other people, and even God) was never a reliable measure in the first place.

At this point in my life, with all He has done for me and shown me, I find myself asking a different question. I don’t just ask what I believe about things anymore. I ask who taught me that. It’s funny that lesson started as an outward one. People say something that was clearly not what Scripture had said, and I’d say “Who lied to you about that?” If only I’d have known I’d been lying to myself about so many things (and not on purpose, by any means).

Something being written deeply into me does not mean God wrote it there. Some things need to be examined and some need to be corrected. Some, I am discovering, need to be erased entirely so that I can finally see what He actually wrote.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
—Jeremiah 17:9

For most of my life, I thought I knew what this verse meant. Don’t trust your heart. Don’t trust your feelings. No matter what, definitely don’t trust what you want. Your heart will lead you somewhere you shouldn’t go. Except I have learned something important as I’ve gone back and looked at the language. When I hear the word heart in English, I tend to think about feelings. We even talk that way saying things like, “Follow your heart.” “My heart wants this.” “I know it in my heart.” We contrast the heart with the mind. The mind thinks while the heart feels, but that isn’t quite how biblical Hebrew works.

The Hebrew words are לֵב (lev) and לֵבָב (levav), and the lev does a lot more than feel. It thinks, understands, intends, desires, and chooses. It discerns and it can turn toward something or away from something. The lev is much closer to the inner person than to what modern English speakers mean when we say, “the heart.”

If we read Jeremiah through the English idea of heart, it becomes very easy to hear, “Whatever you want is probably bad.” But that isn’t what Jeremiah says. When I finally backed up instead of beginning at verse 9, I saw something else too. Jeremiah begins this part of the passage with a contrast…

“Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the LORD.”
—Jeremiah 17:5

Then…

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD.”
—Jeremiah 17:7

One trusts in man, the other trusts in YHWH. One has a lev that has turned away from Him. And God answers the question as to who can understand it. He can.

“I the LORD search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.”
—Jeremiah 17:10

That’s very different from what I learned to do with this passage. The point isn’t that I should distrust every desire that comes from inside me. It definitely isn’t that because I can be deceived about myself, another person is therefore qualified to tell me what is really happening inside me.

Think about how strange that reasoning actually is. Your heart is deceitful, so you might not understand your own motives. Okay. But yours is deceitful too. So, how did we get from human beings cannot perfectly understand the heart to you understand mine better than I do? Jeremiah doesn’t make that move. We do.

The biblical answer to the limits of human self-knowledge isn’t another human being. It’s God. That doesn’t mean I always know myself perfectly. I don’t. I can’t possibly. I can rationalize. I can misunderstand myself. I can convince myself that something is righteous when it isn’t. I can want something for the wrong reasons. I can have mixed motives. I can be completely sincere and still be wrong. That’s exactly why I am always asking God to search me.

The fact that I can misunderstand my own heart doesn’t transfer ownership of it to somebody else, however. It doesn’t make another person’s interpretation of me revelation. It doesn’t mean every accusation about my motives deserves more authority than my own testimony simply because Scripture says the heart can deceive. There is humility required on both sides.

I have to be humble enough to say, “I may not understand everything happening inside me.” The other person has to be humble enough to say, “Neither do I.” And that leaves us exactly where Jeremiah leaves us. With God.

I don’t know my own heart perfectly. You don’t know my heart perfectly either. You don’t know yours perfectly either. But God does.

Now I understand the verse was never supposed to invoke terror in us about having a heart to begin with. It was supposed to make us humble enough to let the One who actually knows it search it.

There is another extreme here that we need to avoid. Because I realized, if I had spent most of my life believing that wanting something for myself was selfish, the answer can’t be to decide that everything I want must therefore be good simply because I want it.

Sometimes our desires are wrong. Sometimes they are not prioritized properly and sometimes we want things because we have been taught to want them. I know I did.

Before the hurricane, I wanted money. I wanted status. I wanted acceptance. Even that looks different to me now because I understand better why I wanted those things.

My entire life, I was taught that image and status mattered. The logo on your clothing mattered. The car you drove mattered. The house you lived in mattered. Even the ZIP code mattered, because those things said something about you to others. At least I learned that they did. I learned that success (or at least the world’s definition of it) had visible evidence. You wore it, drove it, and lived in it. Somewhere along the way, I learned something even more damaging about self-respect.

I thought self-respect was something I had to earn. If I could become successful enough, earn enough money, accomplish enough, maybe eventually my mother would be proud of me. Then, and only then, would I be allowed to be proud of me too. Not pride in the biblical sense, however. I mean something much more basic. I would finally have permission to respect myself.

I had the order completely backwards. I had thought I had to become someone worthy of my mother’s respect. Then that would lead to her approval of me. Then, when I had finally accomplished that, I would be allowed to respect myself. So of course, I wanted money and status. I wanted acceptance, and those desires didn’t appear from nowhere. They were connected to things I had learned about what made a person valuable.

God changed them. Not overnight, and not because I finally learned that wanting was bad. He changed what I wanted, and that is a different thing entirely. And there is something almost ironic about when God finally taught me what self-respect actually is. My bank account is literally negative and some days I don’t know how I’m going to pay the next bill that’s due or get groceries. Somehow, He always comes through. Sometimes through readers, sometimes through strangers, sometimes through miracles some wouldn’t believe if I told them.

I have sold all of the things I owned with designer logos on them to get us through this transition in life. The things I once thought said something about who I was are gone. He had to teach me this in poverty. I don’t think I could have understood it the same way before. I thought I understood self-respect when I had things to point to, like accomplishments, titles, money. Evidence, or so I thought. But if my respect for myself depended on those things, it wasn’t really self-respect at all. It was still conditional. It was still, “I may respect myself because I have proven that I am worthy of respect.”

Take away the proof and what happens? God did take away all the proof. All the sand I had built my house on. And here, with less materially than I have had at almost any other point in my adult life, I finally understand something I spent decades trying to earn.

My worth was never waiting at the end of an achievement. My mother didn’t have to be proud of me first. I didn’t have to earn enough money first. I didn’t have to live in the right ZIP code, wear the right name, or become impressive enough to finally grant myself permission to exist with dignity.

I hadn’t truly understood that before. I do now. That is part of why I don’t think the answer is simply that my old desires were bad. God did something much more profound than tell me to stop wanting money and status. He changed what those things meant to me, and now I have no desire for them the way I once did. He changed what I wanted from them.

Jeremiah records God’s promise…

“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.”
—Jeremiah 31:33

Ezekiel describes it this way…

“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.”
—Ezekiel 36:26

Then God says…

“And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes…”
—Ezekiel 36:27

There is transformation happening inside the person. God doesn’t say, “You have desires, therefore destroy all of them and never want again.” He changes the lev.

Paul says something I understand differently now too.

“For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
— Philippians 2:13

To will. Even the wanting can change. I think I spent years believing sanctification meant learning not to want. To deny myself, die to myself, not be selfish, not chase the world. And these are all true teachings. I had learned, however, to carry them somewhere they had never been meant to go.

I thought holiness meant having less and less of a will of my own. God has been teaching me something very different. He doesn’t have to destroy my will to make me holy. He can transform it. That means I need categories I didn’t have before.

There are disordered desires. There are things I can want because I have been taught that they will make me valuable, safe, powerful, admired, or worthy. There are also ordinary human preferences. I can like a color. I can want my hair a certain way. I can want a comfortable home (trust me, my dream is no longer a mansion by the ocean, it’s a homestead for my grandchildren). I can want rest. I can want meaningful work. I can want beauty. I can want my own bank account. I can want to be treated with respect.

Then there are desires that increasingly grow out of a heart being turned toward God. I can want truth, peace, justice, mercy, wisdom, and faithfulness. I can want to love people well. I can want what He wants. These things can’t all be thrown into one giant category called selfish wanting. They have to be discerned.

Perhaps that is another reason the biblical meaning of lev matters so much. God isn’t merely policing a list of things I want. He is changing the inner person who does the wanting. I used to think freedom would come when I finally achieved enough to respect myself. Earn enough, become enough, prove enough. Maybe make my mother proud enough. Then I would finally be allowed to look at myself and say, “You did it. You’re worth something.”

God didn’t give me that freedom by helping me finally earn enough approval. He began freeing me from needing the approval to determine my worth in the first place. Strangely, beautifully even, that has left me learning how to want again. Not whatever I want simply because I want it, and not wanting nothing because wanting is dangerous. Something much harder and much freer. To bring what I want before God without being ashamed that I want at all, and to let Him teach my heart what is actually worth wanting.

I think we have a strange need to rank suffering. Was it really abuse? Was it that bad? Did anyone hit you? Were you physically afraid? As if we need to determine where someone’s pain belongs on some imaginary scale before we are willing to call what happened harmful. I don’t think we should do that.

I am not saying psychological abuse is always “as bad as” physical abuse. That’s too simplistic. Physical abuse varies enormously in severity, and so does psychological abuse. They frequently exist together. Every situation is different, and I don’t think comparing wounds helps us understand them. We don’t need to rank suffering in order to recognize harm.

I do think physical harm is sometimes easier for us to understand. We can see it. There is a bruise, a broken bone, a photograph, or a medical record. Something happened to the body and there is evidence we can point to and say, “See. There.” Psychological wounds don’t always give us that.

You can’t photograph the belief that you aren’t allowed to want anything. You can’t take an X-ray of someone who has learned that needing another person makes them a burden. There is no bruise left behind when someone has been told, over and over, that their motives aren’t what they think they are. There isn’t a blood test that shows what happens when someone becomes afraid to trust their own memory because every time they remember something differently than someone else, they’re told they’re lying.

Just because we can’t easily test for it, it doesn’t mean nothing happened. Words can harm people. Shame can harm people. Intimidation can harm people. Chronic accusation, manipulation, and degradation can harm people. Constantly undermining another person’s ability to trust their own perceptions absolutely harms them.

I know that now in a way I don’t think I understood before. Scripture doesn’t treat these things lightly either. Proverbs says, “There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing” (Proverbs 12:18). Like sword thrusts. That’s very physical language for something that is spoken.

The proverb doesn’t say words and swords are identical. It doesn’t have to. The point is that something doesn’t have to pierce the skin to wound a person. James goes even further, saying, “So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire!” (James 3:5) and then, “And the tongue is a fire…” (James 3:6).

Fire. A sword. Scripture doesn’t seem particularly interested in reassuring us that words aren’t real harm because nobody was struck. It warns us about their power. Anyone who claims His name must take this seriously. Sometimes we can become so focused on whether something meets our definition of abuse that we stop asking a much more basic question. What did this produce in the person? Did it produce fear? Shame? Confusion? Self-hatred? Silence? Did it cost them their ability to trust their own perceptions? The belief that they aren’t allowed to have needs? The belief that they must keep everyone around them happy in order to be safe?

Those are fruits too. Paul tells us, “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up…” (Ephesians 4:29). Then only a few verses later, he tells us, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice” (Ephesians 4:31).

Why is this the case? Because what we do to one another matters. What we say matters, how we use anger matters, how we use shame matters, and how we use authority matters. Just because another human being attaches God’s name to those things, it doesn’t make them holy.

There is another way we can wound people with words too. Sometimes someone is already wounded, and then we interpret the way that wound shows up as evidence against their character. They are angry about what happened, and we tell them they are bitter. They aren’t ready to let someone back into their life and we tell them they are unforgiving. We tell people they are playing the victim when they try to explain what happened to them. When someone begins to finally say no and present boundaries, we tell them they are rebellious.

Sometimes a wounded person is indeed bitter. Sometimes someone really is refusing to forgive another. People can absolutely seek attention for unhealthy reasons, and many do. They can become consumed by victimhood, and they can be prideful or rebellious. Being wounded doesn’t make everything we do in response to the wound healthy or righteous, but the wound itself isn’t proof of the diagnosis.

When we attach spiritual labels to someone without understanding what is actually happening, we can take a person who is already hurting and wound them again. This time, we may even convince them that their pain reveals something wrong with their relationship with God. It’s especially dangerous when we speak as though our interpretation carries His authority.

There is an enormous difference between, “God knows the heart.” And, “I know what God knows about your heart.” One acknowledges His authority, while the other risks assuming it.

Sometimes I think we minimize psychological harm because acknowledging it would require us to take seriously many of the behaviors we have normalized. Screaming, humiliation, constant accusations, or controlling another person through guilt. Telling someone what they think and feel instead of listening when they tell us. Using Scripture to silence them. Maybe it’s true that nobody got hit. That doesn’t automatically mean nobody got hurt, and it certainly doesn’t mean God doesn’t care or that He approves of what happened. He may actually be very angry about it. It’s not for us to decide.

A wound does not become insignificant because nobody bothered to (or is physically able to) photograph it.

I was twenty years old when I sat crying in that doctor’s office. I had one child. I have many children now, and somehow, I have four grandchildren. That changes the way I look at all of this.

For so long, I couldn’t make sense of things. I had so many questions. What was wrong with me? What did I do wrong? Why did I deserve this? Then, it became “What happened to me?” Then, “Why do I believe these things?” Why was I so afraid to want? Why did I assume someone’s anger meant I had done something wrong? Why did I let other people tell me what my motives were? Why did I distrust my own memories? Why did I make myself so small? Those questions mattered, and they still do. But other ones matter more now (and I have answers to the others now, from Him).

Something has changed. The last several days have been quiet. Really quiet. Definitely not around me, but inside of me. In that quiet, I have begun to realize there is another question I need to ask. Not only, “What happened to me?”, but, “What am I responsible for doing with what I understand now?”

I don’t mean I was responsible for what happened to me. I wasn’t. I mean I am responsible for what I hand forward. Suddenly I read Deuteronomy differently.

God tells Israel, “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:6). Then, immediately, “You shall teach them diligently to your children…” (Deuteronomy 6:7).

There it is again. The heart. And then the next generation. It asks us what is on our heart, and then tells us to teach that to our children. I don’t think that’s accidental. We hand things down. We teach our children what we believe about God. Not only when we open a Bible. We also teach them through the way we love them. Through the way we correct them and respond when they disagree with us. Through what happens when they say no, and through what happens when they need us.

Parents teach through instruction. We also teach through relationship. That makes me think differently about my responsibility to my children now. They are not me. I think somewhere along the way I finally understood something that should have been obvious:

They get to be their own people. They are allowed to want things I don’t want for them. They are allowed to disagree with me. They are allowed to say no. They are allowed to need me. They are allowed not to need me. They are allowed to remember something differently than I do. They are allowed to tell me that something I did hurt them. They are allowed to make choices I wouldn’t make. They are allowed to become people I did not design.

I am their mother. I am not their God, and I don’t fully know their hearts either. That realization carries more weight for me now that I have grandchildren. Four of them. Another generation. There are people who will learn things about themselves, relationships, and God partly through the people raising and loving them.

That is a responsibility I understand differently now. Not a responsibility to be perfect. I can’t do that. I have gotten things wrong with my children. I will get things wrong again. I will misunderstand them sometimes. I will say something badly. I will assume something I shouldn’t. I will hurt someone I love without intending to. That’s part of being human. The responsibility isn’t perfection. It’s what happens afterward.

What do I do when one of my children tells me I hurt them? Do I listen or do I immediately defend myself? Do I explain what I meant before I have even heard what they experienced or tell them they’re too sensitive? Do I tell them that’s not what happened? Do I tell them what their motive must be for bringing it up? Do I make their pain about how terrible it makes me feel? Can I listen long enough to understand?

Maybe that’s one of the most important things I can hand my children. Not a mother who never gets anything wrong, but a mother who can be wrong without requiring her children to become wrong so she can remain right. A mother who doesn’t need to control their memories to protect her own. A mother who can let them be separate. A mother who knows that repentance isn’t humiliation. It’s love.

Paul tells fathers, “Do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).

The instruction of the Lord. Not my fears or my wounds. Not the lies someone handed me. Not my need for them to become something that makes me feel successful as a mother. His instruction.

Some things were written into me so deeply that I mistook them for truth. Now I know better, and knowing better gives me a responsibility. I cannot change what was handed to me, but I can pay very close attention to what I hand forward.

What is on the heart does not necessarily end with the person carrying it. Sometimes it reaches the next generation. And the one after that.

I had one child when some of these lies were being written into me. Today I am blessed with children I gave birth to and children who I was blessed with in other ways. I have grandchildren watching what I do with the truth now that I can finally see it. It matters to me. What is on my heart, and what am I teaching them?

God knows the heart… There is freedom in that sentence that I couldn’t see before. I had spent so much of my life trying to explain myself and trying to make people understand what I meant. Trying to prove that the motive someone had assigned to me wasn’t mine. Trying to find the right combination of words that would finally make someone say, “Oh. I understand you now.” Sometimes they did. Mostly they didn’t. Sometimes they had already decided why I did something, and nothing I said was going to change it.

I don’t have to do that anymore. I can explain myself. I can clarify. I can listen when someone sees something in me that I may not see. I can examine myself honestly. I can receive correction. I can repent when I am wrong. I no longer have to spend the rest of my life standing trial before every person who misunderstands me.

God knows my heart. He knows when I am afraid. He knows when I am prideful. He knows when I am trying to love someone and getting it wrong. He knows when I am being selfish, when I am simply wanting something, when I am deceiving myself, and when someone else has misunderstood me. He knows the things I don’t even know about myself yet.

So, I ask Him to do what David asked…

“Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!”
—Psalm 139:23

Search me. Show me, correct me, and change me. I don’t have to be terrified of that prayer anymore either, because the God searching my heart is also the God who promised to make hearts new.

There is another side to this freedom. If I don’t have to accept every motive someone assigns to me, then I don’t get to assign motives to everyone else either. Their hearts belong to God too.

I can look at fruit. I can recognize patterns, call harm what it is, tell the truth, establish boundaries, and decide that someone is not safe for me. I can listen to correction, forgive, repent, and love. I no longer, however, have to crawl inside another human being and explain to them why they are really doing what they’re doing. I can leave what is hidden where Scripture puts it. With Him.

Maybe that is what I was missing all along. God knowing the heart doesn’t make behavior irrelevant. It doesn’t mean intentions excuse fruit or that I have to remain around harmful behavior because perhaps the person “means well.” It definitely doesn’t mean that every desire that rises inside me is automatically righteous. It means God sees the whole thing.

My Abba sees the fruit. My King sees the things other people see and the things they don’t. He sees the things I understand about myself and the things I still don’t understand. He sees all of it. El Roi. So I don’t have to see it. Neither do you. There is humility in that, but I have found that there is also tremendous freedom.

I can stop trying to be the judge of another person’s hidden places, and I can stop appointing other people judges over mine. God knows the heart, so He does it.

I now find myself thinking more and more about the people coming after me. I cannot change what was handed to me, and I cannot go back to twenty-year-old me and tell her that wanting her own bank account wasn’t selfish. I cannot sit beside her in that doctor’s office while she waits more than an hour for her husband, crying and ashamed because she thinks she did something wrong by calling her mother. I cannot tell her not to hide what happened. I cannot undo the years she will spend believing other people’s anger tells her something about who she is. I cannot erase any of that from her story, but I know something now that she didn’t know. What gets planted deeply in a person can remain there for decades. A sentence, a judgment, a lie. Even an understanding of God.

That knowledge gives me responsibility. The lies do not have to become their inheritance. They don’t have to learn that love requires self-erasure and that wanting makes them selfish. They don’t have to learn that another person’s anger proves their guilt and they don’t have to learn that being misunderstood means they must surrender their own understanding of themselves.

My children and grandchildren can learn something different. They can learn that God knows them completely. That they can bring their hearts to Him without being afraid of what He will find. They can learn that correction is not rejection and that boundaries are not hatred. That they are allowed to become the people God made them to be.

They can learn that it’s okay that other people will misunderstand them sometimes, and sometimes they will misunderstand others. When that happens, they can listen. They can ask, remain humble, and look at fruit without pretending to be the One who searches hearts.

Jeremiah records God’s promise, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” (Jeremiah 31:33). I spent decades discovering things written deeply inside me that God never wrote. Now I get to examine them and hold them against His Word. I get to let Him remove what isn’t true, and I get to be careful about what I place into the hearts of the people He has entrusted to me.

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